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Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could
charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The
personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If
I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not
have been able to build my own computers anyway.

He also details examples of how difficult it was to start a new service
the way the telephone system used to be,
how radio used to all be freely receivable,
and how cable TV is mis-regulated.
He summarizes his case:

I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the
country. When I’m asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open
truth. When I was first asked to “sign on” with some good people
interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic
system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the
other hand, I’m a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals
and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time
and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or
control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I
speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.

Then he asks for all that not to happen to the Internet:

We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking
out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still
wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one
of the most important times ever for the FCC, it’s probably the most
momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times
in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents
the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is
good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the
FCC itself.

But the reality is that nowadays, one can choose between a game costing £40 that will last weeks, or a £10 CD with two great tracks and eight dud ones. I think a lot of people are choosing the game – and downloading the two tracks. That’s real discretion in spending. It’s hurting the music industry, sure. But let’s not cloud the argument with false claims about downloads.

Or keep making such claims and keep electing Pirate Party members the the EU Parliament.
Either way such claims have a limited life span.

Andrew Odlyzko asks what if the duopoly gets its way and completely
does away with net neutrality:

But what if they do get their wish, net neutrality is consigned to the
dustbin, and they do build their new services, but nobody uses them? If
the networks that are built are the ones that are publicly discussed,
that is a likely prospect. What service providers publicly promise to
do, if they are given complete control of their networks, is to build
special facilities for streaming movies. But there are two fatal defects
to that promise. One is that movies are unlikely to offer all that much
revenue. The other is that delivering movies in real-time streaming mode
is the wrong solution, expensive and unnecessary. If service providers
are to derive significant revenues and profits by exploiting freedom
from net neutrality limitations, they will need to engage in much more
intrusive control of traffic than just provision of special channels
for streaming movies.

But video, and more generally content (defined as material prepared by
professionals for wide distribution, such as movies, music, newscasts,
and so on), is not king, and has never been king. While content has
frequently dominated in terms of volume of traffic, connectivity has
almost universally been valued much more highly and brought much higher
revenues. Movies cannot be counted on to bring in anywhere near as much
in revenues as voice services do today.

The Internet isn't about Sarnoff's Law (broadcast content like TV, radio, and newspapers)
or even about Metcalfe's Law (1-n connectivity, like telephone or VoIP):
it's about Reed's law,
2n-n connectivity, such as blogs, P2P, and facebook).
That's my interpretation;
Odlyzko probably wouldn't agree.

Anyway, that video content such as movies is king is one of the primary
delusions Odlyzko addresses in this paper.
The other is that movies need to be streamed in realtime.
It is mysterious why people continue to believe that in the face of the massive
evidence BitTorrent and other P2P services that deliver big content
in chunks faster than realtime.
I can only attribute this second delusion
to a bellhead mindset that still thinks in
terms of telephone, which was realtime because nobody knew any other
way to do it back in the analog-copper-wire-connection day.

As Odlyzko sums it up:

The general conclusion is that the story presented by service providers,
that they need to block net neutrality in order to be able to afford
to construct special features in their networks for streaming movies,
is simply not credible. If lack of net neutrality requirements is to be
exploited, it will have to be done through other, much more intrusive
means.

So why let the duopoly force a policy on everyone else that won't even work
to the advantage of the duopoly?

One way to get net neutrality would be to let the duopoly have its way,
and wait for it to implode.
However, given that for streaming video to have any chance of succeeding,
the duopoly would have to clamp down on everything else to eliminate
any competition, I shudder to think what this would mean.
The Internet as a source of real news and opinion would go away.
Given that the vestigial traditional news media in the U.S.
(TV, radio, newspapers) provide so little news, there's a very
good chance that most people in the U.S. wouldn't even know
how bad they had it as the country sped its slide into parochialism
and irrelevance.
How many people even know now that the U.S. has slid from #1 to #23
or whatever the latest number is in broadband uptake?
If the duopoly is given its head, even fewer would know.

If we let King Kong Telco and T Rex Cableco battle it out to be
Movie King of the Internet, where does that leave poor Fay Wray Public?

FCC, FTC, Congress, executive, and courts, not to mention the public,
should all read Odlyzko's
paper, and should all refuse the duopoly's demand for special
privileges that won't even produce profits for the duopoly.
Then all of above should legislate, enforce, and maintain
net neutrality so we will all profit and benefit.
Yes, even the duopoly can win with this.

Harper goes on to predict that meanwhile real competition could develop.
And pigs could fly, but that's not the point.

This is the point:

The paragraph prior to the provocative line suggesting regulation of universities contains this sentence: “Allowing some Internet service providers to manage P2P traffic – much less to engage in complete blocking of P2P traffic – while prohibiting others from doing so would be arbitrary and capricious.” This is an administrative-law term of art – “arbitrary and capricious.” The use of it tells us that NCTA or Comcast will challenge the FCC’s decision to regulate only one provider of Internet access without regulating all similarly situated.

But Comcast is under a different regulatory regime!, says Harold and the others. Not in an enforcement of this “broad policy statement” thing-y. The FCC is claming free rein to regulate – not authority based firmly in statute – and if it can throw that rein over cable ISPs, it can throw that rein over universities, over Starbucks, and over the open wi-fi node in Harold’s house.

Now, given the free rein that the FCC is asserting, there is a darn good argument that it’s arbitrary (and “capricious”) to regulate only cable ISPs or commercial ISPs in this way. The FCC has to regulate the whole damn Internet this way if it’s going to regulate Comcast.

All that plus if a court rules the FCC's recent decision is
"arbitrary and capricious", that will be used as a precedent
to require universities to regulate content
on their networks in favor of big copyright holders,
as elements in Congress
have been trying to do for about a year now.

This is rather like crying foul because courts regulate contracts.
I wonder how the free market would operate without them?
The Internet free market in applications and services wouldn’t
operate very well without net neutrality.

Now they want to squelch everybody else’s P2P and especially online video,
except what they get a cut of.
They think they can get away with it if the FCC stays out of the way,
so now they are against regulation.

Their principles flip-flop kind of like Boehner’s, don’t they?
Bunch of cry babies.

To make sure that time-critical applications like VoIP and gaming are always prioritised

To protect interactive applications like web-browsing and VPN from non-time sensitive download traffic

To flex the network under demand to cope with normal peaks and troughs from day to day and month to month

To flex the network more gracefully than other ISPs in the event of unusual demands in traffic or disaster situations such as a network failure

To provide a service relative to the amount each customer pays in terms of usage and experience

Provides a ‘quality of service’ effect, meaning multiple applications running on the same line interact with each other effectively, and use of high demand protocols like Peer-to-Peer doesn’t swamp time-sensitive traffic such as online gaming or a VoIP call.

Interestingly, this list does not cite video as the most-favored application,
instead it lists VoIP and gaming, which are participatory services.
However, scan down to their table of types of traffic,
and VoIP and gaming are Titanium, while video-on-demand is the highest
level, Platinum.
Continue reading →

Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to re-instate
Net Neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only
appoint FCC commissioners that support open Internet principles like
Net Neutrality?”

Facebook, MySpace and Google might not have been started if you did
not have a level playing field for whoever has the best idea. And I
want to maintain that basic principle in how the Internet functions.
As president I’m going to make sure that [net neutrality] is the
principle that my FCC commissioners are applying as we move forward.

Here’s another view of what the telcos and cablecos have in mind for us,
or, rather, what they want in our minds:
approved content.
This is substantially different from the Internet freedom we have today
to look at whatever we want to and to publish our own content.

Two years ago the New York Times made its best marketing estimate
of how to derive income from the web, and put many of its back stories
beyond a paywall called TimeSelect, at $49.95/year or $7.95/month.
Times change:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site,
NYTimes.com.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

The ITU defines “NGN” as a network that provides
quality-of-service-enabled transport technologies. The idea is that
packet transport will be “enriched with Multi Protocol Label Switching
(MPLS) to ensure Quality of Service (QoS).”

Translation, as far as I can tell: packet transport becomes the same
as circuit-switched transport. Prioritization is controlled; it’s a
network optimized on billing.

This takes us back to the bad old days when national telephone companies
sold you data service by the byte, through their preferred protocol, X.25.
The advantage of circuit switching was supposed to be fully provisioned
copper wires or other resources all the way through between two parties.
The disadvantages were that you sometimes couldn’t get a connection
and the high price, which got even higher between countries.
It seems the telcos have settled on MPLS as their modern equivalent of X.25.